Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, died Jan. 16, 2009, at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.

He was a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art.

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders.

Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject. Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. John Updike said: ''In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the scorn was simple gallery politics; but resistance to Wyeth remains curiously stiff in an art world that has no trouble making room for Photorealists like Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein and graduates of commercial art like Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, and for that matter, Edward Hopper.''

One Wyeth picture, ''Christina's World,'' became an American icon like Grant Wood's ''American Gothic.'' Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate.

Andrew Newell Wyeth III was born on July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, Pa., the fifth child of Carolyn and Newell Convers Wyeth, the great illustrator famous for his pictures for ''Treasure Island,'' ''Robinson Crusoe'' and other classics of literature. N.C. Wyeth became a role model, teacher and inevitable point of comparison in Andrew's pursuit of his own career as an artist. The situation repeated itself a generation later when Jamie followed his father Andrew as an artist.

While he admired his father's intensity, which he hoped to match, Wyeth’s imagery differed from his father's. N.C.'s work was full of action and drama; Andrew's work often had no people in it. The young Wyeth's hero, after his father, was Winslow Homer. He moved to Maine, made a pilgrimage to Homer's studio at Prout's Neck, and the vigorous, shimmering watercolors he began to paint aspired to Homer's fleeting effects of light and movement.

In 1937, through an associate of his father's, the Macbeth Gallery in New York gave Wyeth his first one-man show, which sold out at the opening. At the same time he began to work in egg tempera, a technique that appealed to his fastidious, traditional and tight-lipped side, with its dry, chalky, ghostly effects. He married Betsy James of Maine in 1940; she became his business manager and as strong an influence on him as his father.

Wyeth lost a lung, survived a near-fatal illness, and had a hip operation, but kept working, energized partly by disdain for his detractors. ''I'm not going to let them disrupt my old age,'' he said.

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